It was a big orange plastic affair, with a decent sized main keyboard and a bank of big chunky buttons on the left hand side. Pressing the keys on the keyboard made a strange humming sound at the desired pitch, whilst pressing the chunky buttons produced a chord, although at the time I thought a chord was a piece of thick string so what relevance these buttons had was completely lost on me.

The keys on the keyboard were all labelled, though with numbers rather than letters as you might have expected. The organ came with a song book that used these numbers to tell you how to play a tune. Whilst perhaps a simpler way of learning to play, ultimately the numbers were probably a bad idea as you’d only need to relearn the proper musical notation when you progressed on to a “proper” instrument.

It wasn’t long before we got bored with playing unrecognisable tunes so we starting messing about, and soon discovered that if you held several keys down at once, the poor organ started to struggle to make any sound at all. This has puzzled me for years, but it was only when I came to write this post that I found out why this was.

The Bontempi Air Organ, as the name suggests (although at the time I just knew it as an organ) uses air to produce its sound. A fan blows air through a pipe, and pressing the keys opens and closes little holes in that pipe. Pressing too many keys caused to many holes to open and the air generated by the fan inside was just not strong enough to produce a noise.

Bontempi themselves are an Italian company, and whilst they no longer make air organs, they are still in the children’s toy instrument market, with a range of electronic keyboards, guitars, xylophones and the like.

However, there was a sudden fad for the Yo-yo when I was at secondary school, which is why I’m writing about them. A friend of mine brought his into school one day and started doing a few very simple tricks with it. Up to that point I had of course played with a Yo-yo before, but all I ever did with it was make it go up and down the string, which got a bit boring after a while.

My friend kept throwing his Yo-yo out in front of him and looping the loop with it, and at that point I was hooked. At the first opportunity I went Yo-yo hunting, and I ended up with a cheap metal Yo-yo that was blue with a picture of a panda on it, but it was all I could find, so it would have to do. I started practising and before long was copying my friend’s tricks of throwing the Yo-yo out horizontally, or performing loops.

I triumphantly demonstrated my new skills to my mate, who then went on to show me his new trick. He called it “the spinner” but I later learned the accepted term for it is a sleeper. With a sharp flick of his wrist he sent the Yo-yo to the bottom of the string, where it stayed, spinning round and round like mad, instead of rolling back up the string. He then slapped the back of his Yo-yo holding hand, and it climbed back up the string into his hand.

I was amazed at this, but no matter how hard I tried I couldn’t get my Yo-yo to do it, so I asked my friend for help. He showed me his Yo-yo, which was made by world leading Yo-yo manufacturers Duncan. He explained how instead of the string being tied to the central axle the string was actually twisted together so that the end of it was a loop into which the axle was placed. This allowed the Yo-yo to spin on the string instead of immediately return back up it.

So, off to the shops I went again, and this time managed to find myself a much better Yo-yo, and also a book explaining how to do various tricks including the infamous Walking the Dog, where you allow the Yo-yo to touch and roll along the floor before returning to your hand. I practised and practised, and whilst I managed to (sort of) walk the dog it wasn’t long before the fad at school ended and I started to lose interest.

The reason this particular memory from my childhood came into my head was that I stumbled across a new Yo-yo made by Duncan the other day. The reason it caught my eye was the price tag. I might consider spending five pounds on a Yo-yo, perhaps even ten, but this baby costs a cool £300! The Duncan Freehand Mg is a precision piece of kit, with the body made from 99% magnesium and the central ball bearing axle being made of ceramic and surgical grade stainless steel.

Personally I could never justify that kind of expense, but apparently Yo-yo connoisseurs are loving it, stating it as being the most perfect Yo-yo ever made. I should think so too for that price! If you’ve got a spare few hundred quid kicking around that you don’t know what to do with, you can get one from Play.com!

Major Morgan was a musical instrument, of sorts. Made of plastic and shaped like a friendly looking soldier in blue and red uniform, his stomach area comprised a keypad of 16 buttons marked with letters corresponding to the musical note that played when you pressed them. Above the keypad was another little area which had “MAJOR MORGAN” written on in big friendly letters.

Pressing the buttons made the Major produce a weird warbly kind of sound, not that different to the tones produced by the old Rolf Harris Stylophone (which predates the eighties by a little bit too much to be featured here). Great fun could be had by trying to work out which buttons to press to play different tunes, or simply just wiggling your finger over the entire pad to make a warbly din.

The clever bit about Major Morgan was that instead of having to read sheet music, little cards could be inserted over the keypad telling you how to play a tune by pressing different coloured squares. The top section where the name of the toy had been displayed became a sequence of coloured blocks that you just had to follow in order to produce a tune.

The toy came with a set of cards which were mostly nursery rhymes, but extra sets of cards could be purchased separately. I remember my sister bought a set which must have been TV theme tunes, but funnily enough the only tune I remember from those was the theme tune to M*A*S*H! Not exactly the sort of tune you’d expect for a kiddies toy, though I have to say the tones produced by the Major Morgan did render this particular tune very well, making it sound particularly sad and doleful.

Big Trak was a sort of futuristic looking tank which could be programmed with simple commands such as go forward, turn or the ever popular “fire phasers“. If you ever used the languages Logo or Delta on a BBC Micro at school then you’ll be familiar with the kind of movements you could make Big Trak perform.

The revamped Big Trak appears to be almost identical to the original, the only major change being that the keypad appears to have been made a bit larger and less colourful. The only other enhancement is being able to store up to 32 programs in its memory (I believe the original only allowed a single program).

You’ll need to be patient for a little while yet though, as the new Big Trak is not due to be released until Summer 2010, priced at around £40, which is probably less than it used to cost when it first came out. There are also plans for digital camera and rocket launcher add ons to follow, so now you can’t just flash little blue lights at the dog, but take a picture of it jumping into the air as you shoot it with a plastic missile. No word on the rather pointless trailer that the original had though, but that’s no great loss!

Many thanks to my mate Al for bringing this to my attention! Its quite possible my daughter will be getting one of these for Christmas… Ahem!

I remember having a pack depicting various sports cars, and I used to enjoy flicking through the set looking at the pictures and reading the statistics and picking out my favourites. Then, one day a friend of mine said did I want to play Top Trumps. “Play?“, I thought, “I didn’t know it was a game!”

Turned out that those statistics were actually the core of the game. The cards are divided equally between all the players, and the lead player chooses a statistic on their top most card that they think will “trump” their opponents card. For example, it might be the top speed of a car. Whoever has the best card wins all the other cards from that round, and gets to choose the next statistic. You are out of the game if you lose all your cards, and the game ends when one player has all the cards.

From that day on I had a renewed interest in my Top Trumps cards, and even got myself a couple more sets with my pocket money, including a set of dragsters and another of dinosaurs, which quickly became my favourite as like most kids the world of dinosaurs seemed fascinating.

Top Trumps cards first appeared in 1977 and were manufactured by a company called Dubreq, who also created the weird yet wonderful Rolf Harris Stylophone. In 1982 Dubreq were bought out by Waddingtons, who continued to produce the cards into the nineties. After disappearing from shop shelves for a while they reappeared in 1999 under the auspices of Winning Moves, and are still available today.

The original Top Trumps cards tended to be about particular general subjects, such as sports cars, motorbikes, military hardware (yep, there was a pack on tanks I believe) and so on. These topics made the game more popular with boys unsurprisingly, although there were some more girl friendly packs available such as one on horses.

Modern day Top Trumps are far more likely to be tied into a license of some sort, so you can expect packs on The Simpsons, Star Wars, Harry Potter and anything else that kids find interesting today.

The game has proved extremely popular and has travelled all over the globe, from the US to Japan. Most countries also have packs released which are specific to their country. For example, in France there are packs for Asterix and in Japan for Ultraman. Packs aligned to particular sporting teams are also available, such as for the All Blacks in New Zealand. If you want to find out more, pay a visit to the official Planet Top Trumps website.

In the US, where owning a gun of some sort often appears to be mandatory (well, that’s what Hollywood would have us believe anyway), I’m sure Tin Can Alley was extremely popular as rifle owning parents bought the game for little Jimmy to practise on before being handed “a reel gurn“.

Living in the UK where owning a rifle was almost unheard of in the Eighties, it’s a surprise that the toy was even given a launch over here, but there it was, sitting in the Argos catalogue and making my trigger finger itchy, but alas, that itch was not to be scratched. Not until I got a PlayStation and Time Crisis many years later anyway.

I suppose the closest we had to Tin Can Alley was when the fairground came to town, and they had those shooting gallery booths with air rifles, where you can win an oversized cuddly toy or an Elvis Presley mirror.

I don’t know if Tin Can Alley is still available in the US, but it doesn’t seem to be easily available over here. However, a far more British equivalent is available in the form of the Beano branded Dennis the Menace Catapult Tin Can Alley, which ditches the light rifle in favour of a capital Y shaped stick and a piece of elastic. Not quite the same, is it.

The Newton’s Cradle was the invention that really started the idea of the “Executive Toy”, something that someone in a high position in a business wouldn’t be afraid to have on their desk as an idle distraction from their busy work schedule. Nowadays there are a whole range of such gizmos, but it was only in the Eighties, with the rise of the Yuppie and their disposable income that such trivialities became really popular.

So what is a Newton’s Cradle. Put simply it is little more than five balls suspended from a frame, but it is also a great tool for explaining gravity, pendulum motion and the principal of conservation of energy and momentum. Pulling one of the balls aside and letting it drop into the others transfers all it’s energy through the remaining balls onto the last one, which then swings up into the air, only to drop down and repeat.

In a perfect world, with no friction or air resistance the Newton’s Cradle should go on doing this nearly forever, but of course in the real world it will slowly come to a halt as the amount of energy in the system gradually lessens fighting against all these other physical barriers, as well as producing that clacking sound as the balls collide with each other.

The first Newton’s Cradles were very expensive, being precision made from wood. They were sold in a high end shops such as Harrods, but as time went by the toy evolved into the classic design we know today, with the balls and frame being made from metal and the supporting wires becoming pieces of thin cord or plastic.

Mr. Frosty was a snowman shaped piece of plastic whose sole purpose was to take ice cubes and crunch them up to make slushy ice. The ice cubes were placed into his head, and his hat acted as a plunger to keep the cubes firmly pushed against the ice grating surface inside. Turning a handle on the back of the toy produced the slush, which you could then scoop out of a hole in Mr. Frosty’s stomach.

The set came with some little cup like bowls, some ice lolly moulds, and a little penguin shaped plastic bottle (Percy Penguin, as the TV ad dubbed him) which you put fruit juice into and could then squeeze onto the crushed ice.

So why was this not a Good Thing? It sounds perfect for a Slush Puppie fan, but the catch is it didn’t actually work all that well. Of course, on the TV advert a few ice cubes made enough slush to fill two cups for the kids playing with the toy, but in reality crushing the ice was nearly impossible, even for an adult.

Mr. Frosty is still available today, manufactured by Hasbro, although it seems like he has had a couple of face lifts over the years, as whilst searching for an image to accompany this post I came across at least two alternative designs for the toy. I also came across an alternative branded with Snoopy and Charlie Brown but this seems to share the same ice crushing problem it would appear.